"Where she made love to me. On a strand of fairy shells, with a sapphire pool beside us and her little arm about my neck."
Ethel Vernon laughed. "You're about the only man I know who would have told her to remove it."
"I didn't tell her to remove it. I abandoned myself to the situation. You didn't ask, by the way, if she were pretty."
"No, I heard that you had stayed there for a fortnight."
Caragh chuckled. "A very sage deduction," he replied. "Well, she is pretty, though you mightn't think so. It's the sort of prettiness that tempts you in."
"That tempts you in?" she questioned irritably.
"Yes, tempts you in to the character. Like a lamp by the window of a cosy room. Makes you want to go in, and loll in a chair, and look at the pictures—there are pictures—and feel comfortably and gratefully at home. There's a kind of beauty, you know, to which one says, 'Yes, very charming; but, for heaven's sake, let's stay outside!'"
"But you didn't stay outside Miss Nevin's?" Ethel Vernon asked.
"Miss Nevern's," he corrected. "No, as I've told you, I went in, and walked round, and wondered how she had kept it so unspoiled. Most girls' minds are pasted over with appalling chromos of the emotions, as painted in fiction; and there's a stale taint of some one else's experience in everything they do and say; a precocious air of having been vicariously there before. It's quite stimulating to come across a woman who is fresh to what she feels."
"Like the beautiful Miss Nevern! And how did it end?"